Xfce Forum

tjr

Member

Registered: 2012-03-17

Posts: 2

[Solved] Pin programs to taskbar windows 7 style

Hello,

I am in the process of trying to find myself a new desktop environment as gnome, kde and unity seem all to be going into a direction I am not comfortable with. So, I have now been tinkering with xfce (xubuntu 11.10) for a day or two, and it seems to be pretty close what I am looking for. Except for one little thing:

With the current wide screens I typically want to keep the taskbar vertical, and with such a setup, I find the windows 7 way of being able to pin the shortcuts in the taskbar very practical. Tried googling a bit, but it seems that most of the solutions are either old/unsupported or buggy in xfce (dockbarx, talika). I have yet to look what AWN could do. However, the most promising what I found was the taskbar-plugin I found in xfce-git repos:

http://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-taskbar-plugin/

If I have understood correctly, that would be a plugin to the original xfce-panel, which would be nice. So, as I could not find that in any apt-get repos, I tried to compile that from the source and got  a lot of missing packages that I would guess imply that the source is for some other xfce version (I run 4.8).

So, before I decide whether I next give a look to AWN, try to fix the taskbar-plugin or take a look of lxde, I wonder if anyone could have some easier solutions for this issue?

Thanks, and see below the error message I get when I try to compile the plugin:

$ sudo make
cc -fPIC -I. `pkg-config --cflags-only-I gtk+-2.0 exo-1 libwnck-1.0 libxfce4panel-1.0 libxfce4ui-1 libxfconf-0`   -c -o taskbar.o taskbar.c
Package exo-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `exo-1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'exo-1' found
Package libxfce4ui-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libxfce4ui-1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libxfce4ui-1' found
Package libxfconf-0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libxfconf-0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libxfconf-0' found
taskbar.c:6:21: fatal error: exo/exo.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
make: *** [taskbar.o] Error 1

angstrom

Member

Registered: 2011-08-13

Posts: 267

Re: [Solved] Pin programs to taskbar windows 7 style

Your are missing some "devel" package. At least from your error message : exo-devel, libxfconf-devel, libxfce4ui. They may have different name on Ubuntu repo. (I'm using OpenSuse)

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Xfce is NOT Xubuntu. Bugs in Xubuntu don't mean that Xfce is buggy ...

lifeinthegrey

Member

From: Seattle

Registered: 2012-01-17

Posts: 52

Re: [Solved] Pin programs to taskbar windows 7 style

If you're considering AWN, you may want to look at cairo-dock. The full version will pull in all of the plugins and it tries to bring in nautilus / a ton of GNOME crap, but if you install just the core components and a couple of plugins that you want, it works beautifully and minimally. I'm on Debian Wheezy with XFCE, I love it. You can just copy and past this into terminal:

sudo aptitude install cairo-dock-core cairo-dock-rendering-plug-in cairo-dock-animated-icons-plug-in cairo-dock-dbus-plug-in cairo-dock-xgamma-plug-in cairo-dock-musicplayer-plug-in cairo-dock-weather-plug-in cairo-dock-icon-effect-plug-in

Very customizable, and works well vertically.

Last edited by lifeinthegrey (2012-03-17 10:59:37)

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tjr

Member

Registered: 2012-03-17

Posts: 2

Re: [Solved] Pin programs to taskbar windows 7 style

Thanks, cairo-dock made my day.

Complistic

Member

Registered: 2012-11-11

Posts: 1

Re: [Solved] Pin programs to taskbar windows 7 style

Hi tjr,

You can install all the missing dev packages by running `make devenv`. (debian/ubuntu)

Having a look at the Makefile should give you clues if you have issues.

Also, to install this on xubuntu x64 you will need to change the lib directory in the Makefile.

In the "install" section the top line should be:

sudo ln -s `pwd`/libtaskbar.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/panel/plugins/libtaskbar.so

Notice the x86_64-linux-gnu folder and "panel/plugins" insted of "panel-plugins".

I hope that helps anyone who gets here from google

PS: You might want to change the DEFAULT_BUTTON_SIZE option in taskbar-widget.c to a higher number so you can have larger icons

Milozzy

Member

Registered: 2011-07-08

Posts: 14

Re: [Solved] Pin programs to taskbar windows 7 style

Hi guys I really love this plugin, but it seems to not always respect the system icon-theme for the applications and it pretty much always set and icon of an higher resolution than needed, causing it to scale bad.
Is there a way to correct those behaviour (without putting manually all the icons in ~/.config/xfce4/panel/taskbar?

Thanks!